New Zimmer—you know you want it

Carl Zimmer's new book, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), is available, and he has a summary of its contents at The Loom. This should be excellent—Zimmer has a real knack for writing about the evidence for a general audience without diminishing it—and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a copy. More accessible descriptions about what we know and how we know it are exactly what we need to get out to the public!

Have you read the changes? I was a little surprised when I first read them. They are a non issue. Our science advisory board LAUGHED when they read them over the fact that they were causing such controversey. They are a non issue. There are going to be NO material changes regarding how evolution will be taught.

In reality, the argument for the change was won not by the creationists, but by a bunch of palentologists from Kstate who pointed out that the definiton that the school board was currently using essentailly ruled out Punctuated Equilibria (evolutionary leaps), despite the fact that the theory is better supported by the fossil record than the traditional evolutionary theory (slow changes over a long period of time).

Just read through the thread.

Again, if it really was a non-issue then why were the ID folks celebrating?

Maybe they just need to convince themselves that they aren’t wasting their time?

The old definition reads in part, “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” The new one calls science “a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”